NTI Folx Tales 2025:
Weaving Stories of Resistance

​​Folx Tales is a recurring conference hosted by NTI with hopes to link lives and grow community around the Narrative Worldview. It is a conference born from a yearning to relate to each other and to our work from our hearts, not only through academic ideas or prescribed therapy methods. 

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This year’s Folx Tales event will focus on sharing and witnessing stories of Resistance. The Narrative Worldview reminds us that wherever there is violence or oppression, there is always resistance — and that the most common forms of resistance are typically invisible, unstoried, and too often allowed to remain isolated and individualized. 

 

This will be a day of standing against the increasingly rampant and brazen practices of dehumanization, objectification, and marginalization we are seeing in our communities, agencies, and institutions. We hope you’ll join us as we link our lives around shared visions for the kind of world we want to be building and protecting.

 

Conference Structure:

Folx Tales is an immersive experience with opportunities to learn and engage with key narrative ideas and practices, including interviewing, outsider witness practices, and thickening our own preferred identities as helpers and members within our various communities.

 

Response-based Ideas and Implications: We’ll begin the day by grounding ourselves in response-based ideas with Ncazelo Ncube-Mlilo and Matt Mooney, two devoted practitioners who have dedicated much of their lives and work to thinking about how to develop people’s stories of response within extraordinarily difficult and unjust environments. 

 

Witnessing Resistance Stories: Following this, attendees will have the chance to witness and reflect on several community members sharing stories of resistance in varying, important contexts. 

 

Writing, Reflecting, Expression: The day will also include a session with Sarah Beth Hughes and Frank Escamilla, the Bus Stop Prophet, who will lead us in a reflective writing exercise intended to further nurture reflections on our own stories of resistance. 

 

We’ll be making every effort to not have this feel like another day on Zoom. We’re working to design this event to be a lively day of connection where participants can feel cared for and inspired. The structure of the day will support taking breaks, time for integration, and body movement.

 

Learning Objectives:

Re-imagining what a conference might be allows us to play with the phrase "learning objectives" and what that means. Everyone will likely leave with very different, unique, and particular experiences of what was meaningful to them and why. However, our collective hope is that we all might leave with:

 

• A deepened, richer experience of the key Narrative Worldview assumption that people are always responding in some way, especially in the presence of violence and oppression 

• Experiences of communities of solidarity of shared ethics and values

• A rejuvenated commitment to this work and joining with those who consult us to stand against injustices of all kinds

• Fresh, personal experiences of listening traditions that stand against judgment and evaluation in favor of resonance and transport

• A sense of being connected with others around shared purposes and feeling less isolated and alone with problem stories

 

Our greatest wish is that everyone who attends will leave with a richer, perhaps more multi-storied account of how they might want to be living, relating, and responding in this moment and into the future.

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Payment Information:

At NTI, we strive to develop organizational practices and policies that are attuned to the ways that social and systemic injustices disproportionately affect people. For this event, we have decided to adopt a “consensual payment” approach.

 

If you have the financial resources, we ask that you pay $200 to attend this event. Doing so supports people with fewer financial resources to participate and benefit from what we have to offer. If you don’t have the resources to pay the full fee, we invite you to pay whatever you feel is possible given your particular situation, including paying nothing.

 

Your presence matters to us much more than what you can afford to pay. We have always been explicit about welcoming people seeking financial assistance, and we try to accommodate every request we receive. We hope this practice makes it easier for folx to attend without having to ask us for anything.

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